Creating an Effective Social Media Strategy

So you’ve finally decided to climb aboard the social media train. You’ve allocated some budget to the channel and now it’s time to get stuck in… or is it? Many companies are now starting to throw money in the social media pot with nothing other than a vague notion that it’s the right thing to do. Follow them and you may as well just throw your money away.

To be successful in social media marketing you’re going to need a clearly defined strategy. As with any other part of your business, if you don’t have a very clear idea of what success looks like it’s going to be incredibly difficult to find it. Vague ideas about tweets and viral videos on Youtube need to be turned into concrete plans with deliverables.

Why Are We Doing This?
As with any other strategy creation, the first thing you need to clearly identify is why you’re doing it. Are you hoping to increase sales, improve brand awareness, increase conversion, drive greater customer retention, or something else? Once you have a tangible end game everything else comes more clearly into focus.

Does Social Media Meet These Needs?
Having taken the time to clearly define your objectives you should ask yourself again whether social media is the best approach to meet this goal. At this point you should be considering if your audience is out there in the social channels waiting to interact with you, and if so whether this is the best way to engage those customers.

Is the Business Culturally Ready for Social Media?
One of the biggest stumbling blocks for businesses moving into the use of social media channels is that you have to hand over control. If you’re engaging in conversations with your audience you’re not going to be in control all the time and for many businesses that’s a very frightening proposition. Gauge the possible resistance in your organisation and ensure you’ve got their full support before starting out.

Which Social Media Channels Are the Best Fit?
During the research to answer whether social media meets your needs you’ll have noticed some sites and services more closely matched your needs than others. Now it’s time to look at refining the list and deciding which services you’re actually going to use. The blanket approach of being on anything popular is just wasting money if your audience isn’t actually using everything.

If you’re dealing with business leaders still struggling over the “control” issue mentioned earlier, this should influence your choices here too as some channels are less scary than others.

How Will our Social Media Connect with our Overall Strategy?
Of course your social media strategy needs to be integrated into your overall marketing and communication strategy, and importantly share a common voice. It would be something of a contradiction to have a hip and cool Twitter presence, followed up later by a very formal and stuffy order confirmation e-mail.

Your conversations through social media networks are an extension of your customer relationship lifecycle and they need to be seamlessly connected and considered when reviewing the overall customer journey through the business.

Are the Resources in Place to Support Social Media?
Make no mistake about it, having an effective presence is social media takes a lot of work for someone. Whether it’s by regularly blogging, tweeting, making and posting viral content, you need to have enough resource to support your plans.

You should also consider whether you have the right kind of resource to deliver your social media strategy. As well as being a significant time constraint, whoever you’ve got at the coal face will be the voice of your company. Make sure you’ve got someone there that represents your brand values and has a good attitude.

How Will We Measure Success?
There’s not going to be no shortage of data and statistics that you can measure when trying to decide whether your strategy is successful or not. Which statistics are most important is dependent on what your strategic goals are, but you should try and find a connection back to sales and/or profit somewhere along the line

Take into account all these questions and you should be able to create a workable social media strategy that will have a much better chance of being successful, and by delivering tangible results should ensure that you have something to celebrate when it is.